by Terry Fallis
“Mom, you’re not dressed yet,” I teased. “We have to hustle if we’re going to make the ski-jumping class on time.”
Lauren rolled her eyes but said nothing.
“Sorry, dear, but my skis are still in Innsbruck,” Mom replied. “Besides, I’m really not feeling particularly aerodynamic today anyway.”
“No worries. Then how about monster truck racing? I’ve got Grave Digger parked just outside,” I offered. As usual, without thinking.
“Nice, David,” sighed Lauren. “Very sensitive.”
Why couldn’t I have chosen Bigfoot instead of Grave Digger. It’s one thing to put your foot in your mouth. But I seemed to have swallowed my whole leg.
“Lauren, I’m kidding. Grave Digger is a black and green monster truck. It’s probably the most famous and recognizable monster truck in history. Mom knows that,” I backpedalled and looked at Mom.
“Well, I do now,” she said.
Just keep talking, I reminded myself.
“Anyway, you look good, Mom. How are you feeling?”
“Sit here, David.” Mom patted the bed. “I still feel like I’m in someone else’s body, but the fog in my head seems to have receded. I’m drained but more awake than usual.”
“I’m just going to head downstairs to put the kettle on,” said Lauren as she moved to the door.
I sat down and took Mom’s right hand in mine.
“David, while we have a minute and I have the energy,” Mom started. “No funeral, no memorial service, no family gathering of any kind with endless plates of inedible squares and egg salad sandwiches. I just don’t want any of it. The simplest cremation you can get. Donations to the Cancer Society, if people insist. But that’s it. Have you got it?”
I was just looking at her, trying to figure it all out. It was the most animated I’d seen her for weeks.
“Hello, David, hello,” she prodded, squeezing my hand.
“Mom, why all the morbid talk? You’re going to outlive us all. I mean …”
“David. Stop. Stop,” she interrupted. “Just tell me that you heard me and understood my wishes. Have I been clear?”
I thought about turning it into a joke, again. That’s always my instinct in moments of high drama. I resisted.
“Yes, Mom. I understand what you want. We’ll make it happen.”
“Good. Thank you. Lauren refuses even to talk to me about it. She’s usually so practical about such things, but she just puts her hands up, shakes her head, and walks out.”
“Well, I’m not sure I blame her. It’s not a conversation we’re used to having,” I explained.
“Well, it’s done now.”
Mom lay back and closed her eyes as if a load had been taken off her mind. Then she opened them halfway and looked at me. She was almost back under.
“Use your head …” she managed in a whisper.
“… but follow your heart,” I finished, and squeezed her hand. “I will.”
She smiled ever so slightly, closed her eyes, and was soon back down deep. That was a line we’d shared since I was just a kid. It was ours. I know it’s cliché but my mother believed wholeheartedly and headlong in its truth. I guess I believed it too. The proprietary phrase my Mom and sister shared was shorter, but no less profound. It was, simply, “Be kind.”
I gave Lauren a hug in the kitchen as she waited for the tea to steep. Then I headed home.
I didn’t know what I had been expecting on the numbers front. There had never been a contest quite like this one, so we had few, if any, benchmarks to help us forecast how many entries might come in. In the weeks following the launch news conference and all that media coverage, the number of entries submitted grew day by day. Online entries were more plentiful than those received through the mail. This was not surprising, given just how much of Canadians’ lives are spent online. By the end of the first week, we had over 9,500 online entries and about 300 via snail mail. By the following Friday, the end of week two, we were up to 106,000 entries in total.
Over the next several weeks, we continued to pitch media stories whenever we thought we had a hook that came within a few light-years of hard news. We were constantly issuing news releases as newly created thresholds were crossed, including when we hit 200,000 entries, when we hit the halfway point in the window for entering, when we hit 500,000 entries, when we hit the fortieth anniversary of the first space spew – you know, the first time an astronaut threw up in the space station. Okay, I was just making up that last one. But you get the idea. This “pimping” of the program helped us sustain media coverage, which in turn kept those entries flying in.
“Emily, it’s David,” I said into the phone. “Just checking in on the count.”
I was staying in very close contact with Emily Hatch at Borden-Bennett to keep abreast of the mounting numbers. She was responsible for vetting and approving all entries before they were considered official. I seemed to get along fine with Emily, but she wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.
“Yes, David. Let me pull the latest numbers,” she replied, expressionless. “Here we are. At the end of week seven with one week to go, we’re up to a total of 1,235,672 entries, with 34,214 of them submitted by mail.”
“We’re now at more than 1.2 million entries?” I replied, incredulous. “You’re joking!”
“David, I’m a chartered accountant. I never joke about numbers.”
“Fair point.”
It had been at just over 900,000 less than a week ago. The final rush to the finish line was driving our numbers higher than I ever imagined. Amanda would be thrilled. There were about 24 million citizens over the age of eighteen in Canada. So more than 5 per cent of the eligible population wanted to leave the comfort, safety, and gravity of Earth and visit outer space. Interesting. I desperately wanted to go up, but my role with Turner King took me out of the running.
With five days to go until entries closed, I was scanning the top stories on Google News when I saw it. It wasn’t a big story, but it scared me first onto the phone with Emily, and then right into Diane’s office with Amanda on my heels. She was on a call when we arrived but saw that something was urgent.
“Contest?” she whispered, covering the receiver with her left hand.
I nodded slowly with a “my hamster just died” look of angst etched on my face. Diane promptly pushed a button on the phone and set down the receiver.
“Hang on, Crawford, David and Amanda have just arrived. Okay, guys what’s up?”
Great. Just great. Clearly I needed to work on my facial expressions. Diane seemed to have completely misconstrued my look, apparently believing that my hamster was alive and well and running happily on its exercise wheel. At least Diane was not wearing any of her thirteen pairs of glasses, so I was able to make eye contact while constructing and delivering several complete sentences in a row.
“Um, I’m happy to come back later after you’re finished with Crawford,” I said, nodding my head towards the speaker phone and elevating my eyebrows so they were almost breaking free from their forehead moorings.
“Nonsense,” Diane replied. “This will save me briefing Crawford separately on our great progress. Do tell …”
“Okay. Well, to get straight to it, we could be in for a nationwide postal strike in as little as forty-eight hours, leaving us without mail delivery for the final three days of the contest period,” I said with all the gravitas I could muster. I couldn’t seem to muster much.
In Diane’s face, I watched as my hamster suffered a myocardial infarction and fell off the wheel.
“Um, I’ll call you back, Crawford, after we’ve sorted this out if you don’t mi–” Diane started as she reached to hang up.
“Fuckin’ socialists up there,” Crawford shouted. “Why the fuck do you even allow your post office to strike? Just to be clear, we are not delaying the program because you nice Canadians have to spend your tax dollars on a deal with the mailman. Are you hearing me?”
“Crawford, don’t worr
y, we’re on it and it won’t slow us down. I promise you. I’ll call you right back.”
“You’d better fix this and fas–”
Diane hung up before his acidic drawl burned any more insulation off the copper wires.
“Yeah, so who cares about a postal strike?” Amanda said. “Who uses the mail service in this day and age anyway?”
“Well, thirty-five thousand Canadians have entered the contest by mail,” I explained. “I know that’s not a big number next to the online entries but that’s not the point. Emily and her integrity SWAT team will not allow us to make the draw if there’s even a scintilla of a chance that a single legitimately submitted entry is not included. If Canada Post has a strike in two days, we’ll still have three days of mail-in entries stuck in the postal system until they settle with their workers and are back up and running. We’re cooked if that happens.”
“So we go ahead with the draw without them,” Amanda replied. “It’s their own fault for trusting the mail with their entry.”
“You haven’t spent much time with Emily Hatch, have you?” I inquired. “She has already formally ruled that she’ll shut down the draw unless or until all eligible entries are duly registered and included. End of story. End of my new job.”
“But it’s not our fault some Canadians chose a less than reliable delivery vehicle for their entries,” Diane observed. “If we don’t receive the entries by midnight on June 30, they won’t be included in the draw. That’s what the rules dictate, right?”
“You haven’t spent much time with Emily Hatch, have you?” I repeated. “Well, I’m sorry to let the air out of your very reasonable-sounding position, but Emily is setting the rules. We’ve given her that power. She’s in the news release. And she will not permit a draw until all entries postmarked by midnight, June 30, are included. So we’d better pray the union and management come to their senses soon or Crawford Blake is going to come up here and hurt me.”
“Shit. Don’t they know they’re threatening the contest? Maybe we should call the union and ask them to hold off for a few more days till we’re done,” Amanda suggested, apparently in earnest.
Diane and I looked at one another. I let her take that one.
“Amanda, I think they know what they’re disrupting,” Diane said. “It’s why they’re scrambling to get their act together this week. The union is looking for more leverage. Screwing us up and delaying the draw gives them another bargaining chip.”
In that final crazed week, the media, bless them, picked up on the link between the postal strike and the contest. Several reporters tried to get someone, anyone, from the Canadian Space Agency to lash out at the union knowing that controversy and confrontation always amp up the news value and help to sell papers. So we rehearsed hard with Martine Juneau late one night so she could walk a very delicate line. We wanted the additional media coverage to drive last-minute entries. But we did not want to engender any ill will among the postal workers when we knew at that stage there were still undelivered mail entries somewhere in the system. She did a fine job with lots of “Well, we’re hopeful that differences between Canada Post and their union can be resolved without any interruption in mail service, but you’ll really need to speak to them about that. In the meantime, we encourage Canadians who still wish to enter the Citizen Astronaut contest to register online rather than risk mailing it in during this uncertain time” etc., etc. She was very, very good. And the camera liked her, too. And, oh yeah, she’s a rock star astronaut. Even hard-bitten jaded reporters think it’s kind of cool to interview someone who has actually been in space.
Some reporters saw through the ploy and wanted to speak to the jumpy head of the CSA. But we kept Armand Gelinas sequestered in his office and told the journos in various ways that he was unavailable for comment. A rumour that he was dealing with a nasty and difficult root canal somehow surfaced, festered, and spread. I admit we did nothing to clarify it. He was relieved. So were we.
As it turned out, getting their act together to accelerate a full membership vote was tougher for the union than they’d hoped. By the time they’d given notice of the vote and set up their own polling stations across the country, the Canadian Postal Union was just too late to get in our way. But it was very close and caused me a couple of sleepless nights and the need to stay close to a bathroom.
At midnight on June 30, entries for the Citizen Astronaut contest officially closed. Two days later, 92 per cent of the Canadian Postal Union members voted to strike. The day after that, the workers were walking the picket line and mail service ground to a halt. In my mind’s eye, I pictured streams of mail flitting along metal tracks, then slowing down, and finally stopping altogether. Even in my imagination I didn’t look too closely at the mail stalled in their tracks for fear of seeing a contest entry.
When the postal workers walked off the job, I picked up the phone.
“Emily, it’s David.”
“Good morning, David,” she replied sounding as formal, professional, even cold, as ever.
I’d already spent some time wondering whether Emily might be taking her role as protector of the integrity of the contest a little too seriously, or was just built that way. I liked her, but she conducted herself as if she were a public defender at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, not an accountant administering what amounted to a big raffle. I decided it was just her personality.
“Okay, Emily, I’m really looking for some good news here. Today is July 3. Entries closed three very long days ago on June 30. I’m assuming, given the outstanding efficiency of Canada Post, that all contest entries postmarked June 30 have been received and duly registered as eligible for the draw. And, further, that the strike has therefore had absolutely no impact on the contest. Right? Help me out here, Emily. Please?”
I held my breath. The stakes were high. If she didn’t buy what I was selling, we’d have to wait until the strike ended, whenever that was, to ensure that no straggler entries were stuck somewhere in the post as hostages in a labour dispute. It would delay the Canadian side of the contest for who knows how long, and perhaps kill it altogether. I’d seen her flex her regulatory muscles before, and I was worried, okay terrified. Emily seemed to be a strong adherent to the “no contest entry left behind” philosophy.
“We’ve been giving this a lot of thought over here. In the Canada Post annual report last year, the average time from postmark to delivery of a letter is four days. Using this as a guidepost, we can’t be sure that there aren’t some legitimate contest entries still stalled in transit somewhere in the postal system,” she began.
“Come on, Emily, four days is almost the same as three days. Can’t you cut us a break?”
“I haven’t finished yet. I’ve checked Canada Post’s own stats for the first quarter of this year and the average delivery time has been 2.9 days. Apparently it’s the Christmas rush that pushes their average up to four days. So on that basis, and since December is still five months away, we are comfortable declaring the Citizen Astronaut contest officially closed and that all legitimate entries have been duly received and registered.”
“Emily, I could kiss you!”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Actually, it was just a figure of speech,” I explained, a little concerned that she thought I’d been serious. “So we’re free and clear. That’s great news. Thanks so much. Oh, what’s the final count?”
“The official tally is 1,723,590 entries.”
I stopped by to see Lauren and Mom on my way home. I managed to convince Lauren to leave the house, if only for a walk. I sat down in the chair next to Mom’s bed where she lay in a deep sleep. How deep? Well, to try to find a comfortable position in the hard chair, I leaned back, balancing on the rear two chair legs. An instant later I was “balancing” on my back on the floor. The noise I made hitting the hardwood floor was fearsome. I lay there for a moment or two listening for the sirens of the fire trucks surely summoned by concerned neighbours. N
one came. Eventually, I crawled to my feet, righted the chair, and resumed my seat with four chair legs, plus my own two, firmly planted on the floor. Though my ears were still ringing, Mom never stirred. Not once. The power of the painkillers and the toll of the disease itself seldom left her conscious any more.
I pulled out my iPad from my bag, called up The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, and read Mom “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”
Amanda and I sat in the painfully white lobby of Borden-Bennett’s head office on the forty-seventh floor of First Canadian Place. Amanda looked good in a different variation of black on black that I didn’t think I’d seen before. We were both feeling buoyant about making it through the contest alive and escaping the noose of the postal strike.
A young man in a black suit approached.
“Hello, I’m Grayson, Emily’s assistant. Follow me, if you will.”
We walked down an open staircase to the forty-sixth floor and along a corridor to two frosted glass doors. The small flat screen display mounted next to the doors said “Turner King Contest Administration.” Grayson swiped his security card and pushed open the doors. It looked like a repurposed boardroom, probably because it was. Two computers sat on a long table along with four cardboard banker’s boxes. Emily Hatch stood when we entered. Grayson closed the door behind him when he departed, his crucial mission accomplished.
“Good morning, Emily,” I said, extending my hand. “You remember Amanda Burke.”
“Hello, David, Amanda.”
“So this is where the magic happens, eh?” I asked, surveying the room.
“Well, if you mean, is this where we store all the online and mail entries and make the draw, then yes, this is where the magic happens,” Emily replied.
“So when does the magic actually start?” prodded Amanda, who was all business.
“It can start right now.”